The First Novel by a Black American and Other History-Making Firsts

I saw something saying that Curry Katsu (essentially a Japanese-style curry accompanied by a fried chicken cutlet) was considered the best meal of the year. I had never tried Japanese curry before this, but have loved Indian and Jamaican curry since forever. Y’all. This was so good, I had to make it twice (the picture is what I actually made!).

The dish is pretty simple, but I feel like it takes a little getting used to because of its somewhat disparate parts. Here’s a recipe by Yumiko, but I also have tips. I mostly followed the recipe on the curry box that I got from Amazon, but when it came to the cutlets, I made sure to season both sides with salt, black pepper, and a little garlic powder before letting them hit the flour + egg + panko station.

Published in 1859, this was the first novel to be published in the U.S. by a Black American. Technically, it is the second one written by a Black American, as the first is Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown, but the latter was first published in England. It was only after Wilson’s book was published in America that Brown’s book came stateside.

Sketches is essentially auto fiction, and details Wilson’s life as a person of mixed (Black and white) heritage who gets abandoned by her mother once her father dies, going on to live a hard life indentured to a white northern family with an abusive matriarch. The book, and the identity of its writer, was lost in antiquity until Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found it in the early ’80s and fleshed out the history surrounding it.

*Note: The full title basically contains a slur, so I chose to leave it out here.*

Brooks was the first Black American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1950), and it was for her her 1949 collection of poems titled Annie Allen. The collection was inspired by epics Iliad and Aeneid, and followed the life of a Black girl growing up in Chicago’s South Side. The original is very hard to come by now, but there are snippets of it in her Selected Poems, which I have linked.

With this book came the ushering in of a new era. Toomer’s Cane sat at a kind of crossroads. On the one hand, it was an experimental book told in three parts. Its mixed narrative forms — poems, vignettes, and a short play — subverted readers’ stereotypical expectations. In doing this, though, Toomer’s southern Black characters seemed to live stereotyped lives, even as he added nuance to their plight.

This was the book that started the Harlem Renaissance (I wrote a little more about it here). Alice Walker said of it “It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”

The Conjure Man Dies was published in 1932 and is thought to be the first mystery novel by a Black American. It’s set in the time it was written — 1930s Harlem — and follows Frimbo, a man from Africa who has made his home in the U.S. In Harlem, he’s known as a conjure man, and one day his friends find him dead under mysterious circumstances. This serves as a look into the ’30s by someone actually alive during that time, and as a mystery that’s still entertaining. It’s a shame that the talented Fisher, a doctor, musician, and (obvious) writer, died when he was only 37.